Your Uncle

June 24, 2011

I had a sort of fixation with ouija boards as a kid. We played with them at my house and my friend’s house, I made them out of paper and we played with them at recess, we swapped stories on the bus about creepy stuff our ghost ‘friends’ had said the night before. I also had some serious bad vibes and trouble sleeping during that time of my life and I’m not sure it was unrelated. I will never have another one in my house.

The most interesting thing I recall is first getting one as a Christmas present from my uncle. He usually got me magic tricks and I guess he figured it fit the theme. The whole extended family was together, staying at my grandparents’ house for a few days.

After the gift opening was done, my brother and I sat on the living room floor trying to chat with ghosts, asking them to do goofy stuff while we had our eyes closed, to prove they were real… leave a handwritten note on a paper for us, move throw pillows around on the furniture, etc. My uncle thought it was a good joke to listen in from the next room and sneak past us while our eyes were closed, doing the things we were asking the ghost to do. I had a feeling he was the one doing it, but I was having fun with my new toy so I suspended my disbelief and kept on conversing with the board.

During our conversation, I asked the ghost what its name was and it replied S-U-T-I-O. Sutio. A weird name, sure, but I guess a more common name would have been disappointing. It wasn’t until a few years later when I was learning Spanish in middle school that the memory of the name came back to me. If you are talking to a stranger or formal acquaintance in Spanish, “su tio” would be the way you would say “your uncle.”

There's a possibility all of these stories are the result of drugs, mental illness, physical illness, stress, sleep paralysis, dreams, or natural phenomena misidentified. That all of these stories are the result of the story teller lying or exaggerating.
But out of all the hundreds of stories here there is also the very real possibility that perhaps one is the absolute truth, that one has no other possible explanation other than the supernatural.
The question is, which story is it and what would that suggest about the universe.